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Download: Questlove’s Black Fist Friday Mix
—————————————————————————“As far as our definition of hip-hop production is concerned—as far as making beats—[Dilla] is absolutely without peer. Many will come after him and surpass him and do even crazier tricks, but for what my eyes have seen in those short nine years that I’ve known him, that’s going to be a very tall order to live up to. It’s [been]…God, six years since he passed [and] I still use his beats as the energy power pellets to my Pacmanology, if you will.
[Why? Because] I like his kick patches better than anyone; I love his snare patches better than anyone; I love his sample chops better than anyone; I like his ability to flip samples better than anyone; I like his engineering better than anyone; I love his chord structure better than anyone; I love his bass tones better than anyone. It really just starts there. And having listened to all of his beat creations, and over-analyzed them over a hundred times each, there’s just an extreme pristine presentation. Even the stuff that you’re lukewarm on as an average listener, you can’t deny.
You also gotta think about his range. His range is bar none. He’s gone through [four] production phases in his professional career. He didn’t stick to one. That’s the thing that really separates him from everyone in hip-hop. He started off with that post-Tribe, boom bap with [the] loud kushy drums and a bouncy bassline—[which] especially did well for The Pharcyde album and Tribe records. But then in a snap, he went to—once he started working with us, with the Soulquarians—he started playing the stuff live. The most hilarious thing of it all was that he was not technically a musician. But he was able to get the sound that he heard in his head, not only executed onto tape, but he did it in such an original way that it actually started to change our view of how we made music.
The day after he recorded “Think Twice,” for Welcome to Detroit, I look at the drum set, and I was like, “Wait, you recorded that on this?” And it was the most dingiest, dirtiest, not even second-hand. [It] looked like the Fat Albert junkyard gang drum set. Screws were missing; some of the heads were broken. Matter of fact, he didn’t even use real drumsticks on “Think Twice.” He used a vibraphone mallet, and he had a broken drumstick that he got some toilet paper from the bathroom, and some rubber bands. I was like, “You would rather go through this MacGuyver shit than buy new drumsticks?” He’s like, “I didn’t know where to get ’em this late at night; I had to make due.” I was like, “Well, why did you hit the drums with the mallet?” He was like, “I didn’t want the dynamic to be too aggressive. I wanted to sound muted, so I decided to play the drums with the soft cotton mallet.” It looked like putting a marshmallow at the end of a toothpick [Laughs]. Next thing I know, I’m now flying to Philadelphia—I think the next week, [to work on] The Roots’Phrenology record [and] I tracked both “Quills” and “Pussy Galore” the same way. I went and got some orchestra mallets, and then I too started, just ’cause I seen how he got that sound…”
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